At a 266MHz FSB we couldn't see any influence of the memory subsystem parameters on the final rendering task. Here, with an overclocked FSB, the speed of the test shows some dependence on memory timings and frequency.

What we see in the media content encoding test looks much alike to the results of the gaming tests. Once again we are shown that increasing the memory frequency only makes sense when is performed within the limits imposed by the FSB bandwidth.

Even WinRAR, which at a 266MHz FSB ran better on systems with higher-frequency memory, doesn't speed up when we switch from DDR2-800 to DDR2-1000.

Summarizing all this, we can say that high-frequency memory on Core 2 Duo platforms will be demanded by overclockers in the first place. When the FSB frequency is above its default value, setting a higher memory frequency has a bigger effect on system performance than at the default FSB clock rate. In our tests we overclocked the FSB to 400MHz and enjoyed a considerable performance growth on installing DDR2-800 SDRAM. This growth was much more tangible than what we had at a 266MHz FSB, other conditions being the same. However, the system didn't speed up on our using 1000MHz memory because the speed of CPU-memory data transfers was now limited by the bandwidth of the FSB. Still it is clear that if you overclock the FSB to frequencies above 400MHz, you will see performance gains on using memory faster than DDR2-800, too.